This morning, I had a beautiful, divine epiphany. What I “saw” in my mind’s eye was that we are, as a species, approaching a crucial “jump time.” We’re preparing ourselves – and preparing the way – to jump to a higher level of order. By doing so we will empower ourselves to employ greater creative capacity, experience richer diversity, manifest more beauty and joy, and bring forth higher consciousness in service to all of life.
What will this higher level of order look like? If we turn to our own biology for clues, we can compare where we are right now to where the single-celled organisms were in the time before they began to cooperate and build complex, multi-cellular organisms. In every multi-cellular organism, the whole is always greater than the simple sum of its individual parts. It is that “something more” that provides the reward for coming together, because each individual cell benefits more from the joining than it surrenders in the way of autonomy. For thousands of years now, humanity has been focused almost exclusively on promoting and preserving our individuality, on being “separate” from each other in order to maximize our personal potentials. That’s been a grand ride for all of us; it’s enabled us to know and love the joy of our special uniqueness. The thing is, we’ve likely reached the end of the road when it comes to our individual evolution. For us to jump as a species to a higher level of order, what is being called for now is for us to consciously choose to cooperate as a singular, unified body, in order to create a shared system that automatically delivers to every single being in the social body whatever it needs to be the best it can become.
We’re being asked by life itself to fulfill the original promise of multi-cellular organisms, only this time with our individual consciousnesses as the drivers and deciders. We’re being invited to notice and appreciate that we work better together and accomplish much more than we can do on our own, to embrace the realization that when we come together and work together the whole is far greater than the simple sum of us. We’re the newest fractal of an existing social pattern: it’s life’s chosen design, only more complex because we’re bringing consciousness to the equation.
This mission is one we’ve been unconsciously undertaking for many years. We’ve already automated most of our production processes for goods and services, as well as our delivery capacities. Fewer and fewer labor hours are now required for us to make the things we need. In fact, so few labor hours are required to make the things we need that we’ve begun to invest our labor hours in making things nobody needs just to use them up! We’re “making work” to enable individuals to survive, instead of freeing individuals up to do the work that will help us all thrive.
What if we embraced the idea that nobody needs to work full time anymore just to earn their basic needs, and that at most we may each need to invest a few hours each week to ensure everyone’s needs are met? What would we do with our free time and our creative capacity then? I suspect most of us would quickly get bored watching mindless entertainment, which has only served to distract us from the stresses of earning a living. Instead, I imagine most of us would eventually turn to our inner selves to seek and bring forth our passions, talents, skills, curiosity, and our grandest ideas – and apply those to the challenges we’re facing as a collective. What amazing things we might accomplish if our time and creative capacities were free to apply themselves to our serious problems! What wondrous dreams we might manifest if we were able to use our minds more effectively than by paying bills and taxes and worrying about our mortgages and debts. What beauty we might be able to bring forth if all our artists, architects and designers were free to allow their minds to run wild across the playground of their own imaginations, and call forth the amazing visions that dance in their heads!
I believe humanity has already been working toward this jump point for many centuries, but has not yet been fully conscious of what it is doing. We WANT to be free of the need to work hard to meet our daily needs, which is why we’ve automated so many tasks that nobody wants to do. We intuitively grasp that it’s in our best interest to set ourselves free from the daily grind for basic needs, so we can explore our higher capacities and discover what we’re truly capable of. We’ve continuously gravitated toward living in and building social systems because – consciously or not – we realize that what we can create together far exceeds what any one of us can do alone. We’ve already become a multi-cellular organism, but we haven’t quite made the final leap toward sharing and loving social cooperation. We’re still clinging fearfully to the last vestiges of our individuation in the form of self-sufficiency, which is what we need to let go of if we’re to thrive. We don’t need to be individually self-sufficient; we need to be individually manifesting the utter uniqueness of that which each of us is! In that shift we will find our strength, and make our way through the challenges that arise. Not by becoming exactly like each other, but by coming together fully as a diversely creative collection of unique and conscious beings in a shared social body.
Moving beyond individuality and national identity to the next fractal level of the whole (the one rather than the many), if we focus on asking and answering the question of how all human beings can have satisfying lives, and do so systematically, building on the answers we already have and will discover, we will find ways to do that.
ReplyDeleteSuccess will entail finding satisfaction in nonmaterial forms with a sufficiency of material goods, perhaps more elegant and satisfying than what we have now, and doing this in a way that sustains and restores the natural world.
This is a project of collective intelligence and can be accomplished deliberately, though as Eileen says we are doing it by feel already. If we want to do it faster we can make the question above the core question of a system of collective intelligence.
A jump time seems like it might be cathartic. I, in no way wish, to take away from your wonderful vision. Perspectives could be compared to snow. Once they pile up there is a strong commonality, but individually no two flakes are the same. Ooops! I’m not calling you a flake; more like owning my own flakiness.
ReplyDelete“What if we embraced the idea …” Yes, what if there was no longer a need to “earn” a living. What if the creative energy of those supported to fulfill their highest visions produced some much excess that humanity’s cup runeth over? R. Buckminster Fuller proposed such a path over half a century ago. A part of his thesis put forth in Utopia or Oblivion was that design engineering would be our salvation.
Anyway … personally, I see evolution as a team sport and prefer metamorphic process, which, ya know, in geological time could be quite cathartic to any era.
Ironically, an old pre-mechanized army analogy works well to represent a couple of ideas: said army could only travel as fast as its slowest man; supply lines were life’s blood; and campaigns were only successful if stratify, will and dedication prevailed.
What was it Churchill said? “Never ………….”
And … I like to say. Animate amelioration and let the synergy swirl.